Jonathan Gienapp receives Best Book in American Political Thought award

JONATHAN GIENAPP, assistant professor of history, has been awarded the Best Book in American Political Thought award for his book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era.

The award was presented at the recent annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C.

In that book, Gienapp analyzed debates of early U.S. lawmakers in the decade following the Constitution’s creation. He argues those discussions shaped how Americans view this important document today.

“When most people think about the U.S. Constitution’s genesis, they usually think about when it was written and ratified,” Gienapp told Stanford Report in 2018. “But what I try to show is that the years after its creation did as much to give the Constitution the meaning it has today.”

The book also won the 2017 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press and was a finalist for the 2019 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.